Daily Telegraph Football Writer.
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How football could solve problems like Portsmouth

If the football authorities really do want to tackle some of the dreadful financial management at clubs up and down the country, it is time to get rather tougher and base their rules on one guiding principle. Quite simply, if a club does not want to live within its means, the owners should be personally responsible for any debt that they place on the business.

It is a system that would basically mirror what has been advocated by Arsene Wenger but with one crucial difference. Whereas Wenger and Uefa president Michel Platini have argued that clubs should operate within the parameters of the revenues they generate, this rule would still also allow wealthy benefactors to effectively give their money away.

If Roman Abramovich or, lower down the pyramid, a local businessman, wants to plough their own money into improving a football club with no strings attached, I’m not sure they should or can be stopped. Even if new rules are introduced along the lines advocated by Wenger and Platini, they could surely be circumnavigated through some sort of extraordinary sequence of sponsorship deals to the club from businesses associated with their owner.

Yet what must be prevented is the owner who comes in and places new debt on the club without any tangible long-term benefit, or commits the business to spending above and beyond what either he or the club can afford.

If the owner had personal responsibility for new debts, it would surely wipe out the sort of desperate situations we have seen at Portsmouth and Southampton over the past year when the future of those clubs has been placed at risk following spending beyond the natural revenues of the business.

Such a rule would also preclude the sort of unpopular takeover we have seen at Manchester United.

If someone wants to borrow money to finance a takeover, that debt should simply be leveraged against the prospective owner rather than the club. If a club then wants to spend more than it earns, the owner should be obliged to follow what Abramovich has willingly done and pay off those debts.

Such a system would also prevent the curious situation where one of the largest creditors of a football club is an owner or former owner. How can it be right that Alexandre Gaydamak, the former Portsmouth owner, is owed millions when it was his short-term decisions that were largely responsible for the current mess?

With the revenues that are generated, particularly in the Premier League, there is really no reason why such measures should alarm or even impact upon on most clubs.

I have some sympathy with the Premier League when they are blamed for the mis-management of clubs. They cannot possibly predict or manage every decision of every owner.

Football, though, has been showing itself to be almost uniquely irresponsible in the scale of some of its problems. The clubs also hold a unique and utterly vital place in the fabric of this country. And it is for that reason, above all else, that special rules should apply.